I got the coolest email this week, from the programmer for the Vancouver Film Festival — it’s on today at 12:20 for those of you who live there — asking about my Dad, Ron Kelly, whose early films about that city in the 1960s are being honored. (It’s where I was born.)

One of them, about violent youths, was never broadcast by the CBC because of its content. Here’s his Wikipedia entry. He’s alive and healthy at 83, just back from Turkey and heading off to Chicago then Asia in the next month.

In 1962, he won the Palme D’Or at Cannes for “The Tearaways”, another film about misspent youth, this time British, which the BBC also refused to air. Love it!

So when I spend my career looking for tough topics others shy away from, I have a role model for it in him. (My mother also worked as a radio, TV and print reporter, once smuggling tapes of the Chicago 8 trial north to the CBC.) I grew up watching my parents make a nice living digging under intellectual rocks going “Ooooh, look!”

It never really occurred to me to think otherwise, that being polite and obedient and deferring to authority was normal behavior, as it is for many people. I’m hardly a 24/7 hellion, and I’m conventional enough to have a mortgage — but I’m usually most attracted to stories that will piss someone off.

I think far too much “journalism” today is lightweight crap meant to please advertisers and amuse readers, instead of telling truth to power.

I think the world is filled with tough, difficult stories that need to be well-told.

I think many people are too scared to piss off the wealthy who increasingly own our democracies.

My husband, a lovely, gentle man who has worked in the same place for almost 30 years, is pretty much my polar opposite in this regard. He’s a PK, a preacher’s kid, and PKs are typically raised in a bubble of high expectations, docile/polite behavior and the need to get along with everyone. He learned it from his Dad.

But Jose has also has done his share of mixing it up, as a news and sports photographer for The New York Times, telling amazing and difficult stories, like covering the end of the Bosnian War. The way he managed to get a photo of General Manuel Noriega is so insanely inventive it makes me think he missed his calling as a spook. His sangfroid on 9/11 also helped the Times win a Pulizter.

People who go into hard news journalism tend to like poking sharp objects at things. In that respect, it’s a terrific field for a woman like me, who’s nosy, pushy and rarely satisfied with pat answers. It rewards brass-balled women, otherwise generally socialized to “be nice.”

Made by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the movie largely involves the enormous effort, along with the unintentional humor and grim realities, involved in driving some 3,000 sensationally noisy sheep (how do they sleep?) up a mountain for summer pasture. Although the filmmakers shot for a number of years (taking eight in total to finish it), most of the material in the final movie was shot in 2001, when a Montanan rancher named Lawrence Allested became the last person to take his sheep into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains on a federal grazing permit. Primarily in south-central Montana just north of Yellowstone, with a bit spilling into Wyoming, this wilderness area encompasses nearly a million acres and, to judge from the movie, looks like paradise.

It is and it isn’t, depending on the roaring wind, the grazing sheep, the herding dogs and the two singing, cursing hired hands — John Ahern and Pat Connolly — who watch over this often-less-than-peaceable kingdom for a long stretch. Shot in classic observational documentary style, without any on- or off-camera narration to guide you, “Sweetgrass” opens as winter is giving way to spring and the sheep are still at the ranch, being shorn for their wool and giving birth to the year’s lambs. It can be brutal if also caring work. In one scene, a man roughly throws newborn lambs around, trying to gauge which orphan a ewe will accept; in another, a different man puts a fresh lambskin on an orphan, trying to fool the dead lamb’s mother into adopting the new animal.

One of journalism’s greatest joys, for me anyway, is the opportunity to meet people from every walk — or ride — of life. While researching my book about women and guns in 2002, I was welcomed into the home of Doris and Bill McClellan, a house surrounded by thousands of acres of land, a dot on a highway between Silver City and Colorado City, Texas. I was interviewing Doris because, alone that day, every day, miles from help, she’d been attacked by a rabid bobcat that she’d shot — while it was hanging from her right arm. “I could feel the blood squishing in my shoes,” she told me. “I went back to the house, put on my lipstick and dialed 911.”

Bill, then past 70, was a working cowboy. He got up in the morning, strapped on his worn leather chaps, saddled up and rode away.

I felt like I’d met a unicorn, so mythic and unlikely it was to meet this gentle, modest man living a life centuries-old.

One of my greatest fantasies — sue me for my tenderfoot madness — is to one day develop decent enough riding skills to work, even for a day, doing this sort of work. The 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain” , starring Heath Ledger, remains one of my favorites for its rare portrayal of this rough, difficult job.

I’m the broad behind Broadside, Caitlin Kelly, a career journalist. photo: Jose R. Lopez You’re one of 14,910 followers, from Thailand to Toronto, Berlin to Melbourne. A National Magazine Award winner, I’m a former reporter and feature writer at The Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette and New York Daily ... Continue reading →